In the 15 years I’ve worked in Corporate America as a writer of marketing copy, my free-spirited father, Greg—a self-employed builder in a sleepy town in the White Mountains of New Hampshire—has been a fictive vessel for my wishes: to work for myself, to live in a more tranquil, rural setting, to say and do as I please—as he does. While I report to the same building every day, Greg has a different job site every few weeks. While I attend countless meetings on a daily basis, seldom in control of time, Greg plans his schedule and can come and go as he pleases. I do what I’m told, or I’ll be shown the door. No one tells my father what to do or how to think. I envy his agency and ability to be an individual when I must remain obedient, present an artificial identity, and avoid sincerity for the sake of civility.
Though I’m ashamed to admit it, I’m similar to Edward Norton in the movie Fight Club—and my father is Brad Pitt. It’s embarrassing because Norton’s character, the narrator of the story, called Jack, is a tense, miserable corporate employee who can’t sleep because he’s living a mundane, meaningless life. To cope with his gloomy existence, Jack invents a man who helps him fulfill his subconscious desires to live with more confidence. That person is Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden. Tyler is everything the narrator admires: confident, charismatic, and, most of all, free to do and say as he pleases.
In the same way that the narrator in Fight Club put his alter ego, Tyler, on a pedestal, I've put my father above mere mortals. I worship his devil-may-care attitude that allows him to follow his gut when he’s lost on a motorcycle trip with friends. When I ride, my destination is set on my phone’s GPS, and the route is mapped out before I depart, leaving almost zero room for error. Greg fancies “winging it,” whereas I sweat the details. My father sleeps soundly; I wake up at night gasping from acid reflux. The vanity license plate on his truck reads “GBOGH,” meaning “Go Big or Go Home.” And he couldn’t care less if someone driving behind him can’t decipher the acronym.
Three-quarters of the way through Fight Club, Jack realizes that he’s spent months split from reality, communicating with a person who’s never been there. Just before he passes out, overwhelmed by the depth of his psychosis, Tyler explains why Jack invented him: All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I f*** like you wanna f***, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.
Like Jack did with Tyler, I idealize my father and his attitude of not giving a f***. But there’s a problem with idealization: it’s built on a foundation of denial. It often means that you’re revering a person, idea, worldview—anything, in fact—without acknowledging its negative aspects. Idealization is not believing reality; it sees the good without the bad.
For instance, Tyler is charming and bold, but also chaotic and violent. Someone to marvel at for his gumption but also to dread for his recklessness. He’s clever but also juvenile. A role model and a criminal. Was the same dynamic at play with my father? What negative aspects of him was I denying? By idealizing Greg, I could overlook his faults. My idealized father leads his friends down an unknown trail while mountain biking, but my real father must admit he’s taken a wrong turn. My idealized father dashes off unreadable emails to business clients, but my real father loses potential income when those clients cut ties over his lack of professionalism. My idealized father preaches the gospel of self-reliance, but my real father has trouble connecting with people because he often chooses to ignore their pain and dispenses advice instead.
Why do I need this fictionalized version of Greg? By keeping him on a pedestal, I can deny my anger toward him. For years, I’ve viewed him and his lifestyle through rose-tinted glasses while being seriously, albeit subconsciously, angry at him. Greg was of a generation that saw corporal punishment as appropriate disciplinary action. His father hit him with belts, sticks, and coat hangers. His grandfather probably did the same. In childhood, if my brother or I did something reckless, like dropping small boulders down the well in our yard to hear the splash, not knowing we were destroying its inner workings and costing hundreds, we were given a whipping.
As a young boy, I was terrified of how my father would discipline us with a short piece of wood he kept atop the refrigerator and fetched if we acted out. If we were disobedient or broke the rules, we’d scatter and look for hiding places as Greg jogged to the refrigerator to retrieve The Stick. My brother might have slid underneath his bed, and I would entomb myself in a closet behind hanging shirts. My father always found us, however, and dragged us out by an arm or a leg and smacked us on the rear end as we writhed, covered our faces, and wailed.
Jack invented Tyler to rebel against his meaningless life; I created an unrealistic version of my father to ignore my adolescent rage. By idealizing Greg as the ultimate free spirit, I avoided my anger for the pain he caused when I was a child. It meant not accepting that being dominated, hit repeatedly, and left squirming on the floor in pain had been humiliating. Idealizing my father helped me repress the terror of his pursuit with the intent of using The Stick on me. I wouldn’t have to accept that such events made me an anxious adult who still has shame buried in the dark corners of my body.
While Jack starts off the film as cynical, depressed, and psychotic, he's victorious across the story as a whole, in several ways. He quits his soul-deadening job, starts a cultural movement—a cult, basically—and finds a woman who darkly complements him. Jack’s biggest achievement, in my opinion, is that he pierces his illusions and, in doing so, discovers his authentic self. He does so by retracing Tyler’s steps to learn that the man who’s been disrupting his life is, in fact, his own split personality.
I, too, have climbed out of denial by accepting that the fictional version of my father isn’t genuine but rather a figment of my imagination. The same way that Tyler was for the narrator. I have ceased putting Greg on a pedestal and stopped telling folks that his harsh disciplinary style gave my brother and me the enviable self-discipline we have today. Like Jack, I must continue to summon the courage to confront reality and stare clear-eyed into the facts of my life. The truth is that I suffered through trauma and should be kind to myself while the psychic wounds heal.
Near the end of Fight Club, Jack realizes that by not idealizing Tyler he's left only with himself—a product of all the desperation, psychosis, and pain he's experienced. Not worshiping my father lets me see that he’s like all of us: flawed but just doing the best he can. In place of that idealization, I can find something else: admiration. I value his positive qualities and accept his negative, all-too-human ones. He’s a go-getter, but restless. A problem-solver, but unreflective. An optimist, but intolerant of negative views.
Getting honest about Greg allowed me to get real about myself. I had to stop denying that my authoritarian managers were making me unhappy. So when I was offered a new copywriting job for a technology company, I resigned. In my new role, I still write within a corporate environment, but the organization is less bureaucratic and hierarchical and open to fresh ideas. I work in a “storytelling pod” with a team of talented creatives who are funny, open-minded, laid-back. It’s a good fit, and I’ve flourished. And the melancholy and restlessness has lifted.
At the end of Fight Club, Jack realizes he doesn’t need the alter ego to cope anymore. When Tyler refuses to leave, Jack puts a gun in his mouth and threatens to shoot. Just before he pulls the trigger, Jack looks into the eyes of his idealized self and says, “Tyler. . . . My eyes are open.” When he shoots, the bullet bloodies his face and knocks his jaw out of place, but it doesn’t fatally wound him. The bullet does, however, kill Tyler, who blows out a whisper of smoke, drops to his knees, and dies. Not a physical death, but a symbolic one. Jack killed his alter ego.
Like Jack, I, too, have laid the fictionalized version of Greg to rest. By accepting my reality, I admit that I’m not my father—nor do I want to be. I don’t live in the woods; I’m a city dweller. I’m not self-employed; I work in Corporate America. I’m not carefree; I’m careful. When making choices, I don’t think about Greg’s values; I consult my own. With the idealized version gone, only my real father is left, warts and all. And by opening my eyes, at last, I have discovered myself.
Dustin Grinnell is an essayist and fiction writer based in Boston. His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, New Scientist, Salon, VICE, and Writer’s Digest, among many others. He’s the author of three novels—The Genius Dilemma, Without Limits, and The Empathy Academy. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the Solstice MFA Program, and his MS in physiology from Penn State. He grew up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.